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Apple agreed to acquire NeXT and its technology in order to bring back Jobs, when Apple was on the cusp of bankruptcy, was absolutely certain to die, and had no negotiating power. It wasn't a merger.

Also modern Apple devices are based on the NeXT's operating system and have nothing other than cosmetic and emulative compatibility with MacOS. OSX/macOS is NeXTStep on top of Mach.

source: bought $100,000 of APPL in 1997.

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>Apple agreed to acquire NeXT and its technology in order to bring back Jobs

Not really to "bring back Jobs". Jobs was not considered any kind of wonder CEO or miracle worker at the time. They wanted a new OS, as their own traditional Mac OS successor attempt had failed.

They also looked and negotiated with Be (for BeOS), so it wasn't that they wanted Jobs particularly.

It would just be a nice "back to roots" publicity side benefit, but nobody considered Jobs especially their potential saviour at the time...

Even if you credit all of their software to NeXT, Jony Ive was at Apple pre-NeXT-acquisition and it’s hard to imagine their turnaround going as well as it did without his work on the iMac.

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